1. The voters are apparently in the mood for belligerence toward liberals and the media. This is not the same thing as insisting on belligerence that is coherent and consistent over time (for that would have excluded Newt), but they clearly want a scrap. The other candidates should take note.
2. The South Carolina results punctured for good and all the inevitability myth that Romney had been cultivating for himself. Santorum took Iowa, Romney took New Hampshire, and Gingrich took South Carolina. As one web site put it, that looks a lot more like evitability than inevitability. But we should not waste a lot of energy wringing our hands over the blood-letting of the primary season. It is a good system — call it blood-vetting. We ought not to be pining for a “more rational” primary system. We have an honest tournament system now. Reforms by uplifters will just get us a political version of the BCS system.
3. When someone like Ron Paul freaks out the Republican establishment, there is not much they can do about their panic. Whatever you say about Paul, reticence to express the constancy of his views is not usually on the list, and the GOP establishment doesn’t have any handles on him. There is good reason to believe that Newt freaks out the GOP establishment in a different way. Newt is a long-time insider, knowing the twists and turns of every rat tunnel under the Capitol. In return, the establishment knows him, knows where the bodies are buried, and knows where the file cabinets are. I refer to particular file cabinets, the contents of which would be enormously damaging to the Gingrich campaign. Look for the leaks to start very soon.
4. Newt cheated on his first wife with his second wife, and cheated on his second wife with his third. This means, incidentally, that in her recent interview his second wife was complaining about what Newt had done to her, when that was she and Newt had together done to his first wife. She complained that Newt had wanted an open marriage, but why was she surprised? She had participated in a practice run with him a bit earlier on. So this point is not taking up her account as gospel.
But, at the very least, does not this particular set of tangles call the caliber of Newt’s judgment into question? Suppose the charge is not adulterous philandering of the predatory variety, but rather a short attention span with regard to everything? As Santorum put it, Newt has “an idea a minute,” and there he is, impulsively charging off after the most recent shiny thing. Sometimes it is another woman, and other times it is global warming or the individual mandate. Oh, great. That’s what America needs — another Nixon, only without the discipline.
5. One of the historic reasons why homosexuals were denied security clearances is because of the possibility of blackmail. They were denied security access, not because of “bigotry,” but rather because they were a security risk. The same kind of thing would apply to adulterers. Now run a thought experiment. If Newt gets the nomination, does anybody seriously think there won’t be more about Newt’s sexual proclivities surfacing in the general campaign?
These bimbo eruptions will surface in one of two categories — the charges will either be true or false. If true, then, well, there we will be, wondering how many more trillions Obama can get over the next four years from his secret bank account on the moon. If false, then it will be slander, but it will be sticky slander. The public and acknowledged facts of Newt’s life will make him particularly vulnerable to that slander. In other words, Newt is a nomination risk, and this aspect of his life is a no-lose proposition for the Democrats.